“There was a story called The Small Assassin; it’s basically postpartum depression from hell. It’s about a baby who is awake before it’s born, experiences birth, ends up hating his parents and tries to kill them,” the 53-year-old Toronto science-fiction writer says. “It ends with this pediatrician pulling a scalpel out of his bag and going baby hunting while something quietly moves around upstairs. It’s just this deeply creepy, disturbing story which I read in the late ‘60s and haunts me to this very day.

Bradbury, the science fiction-fantasy master behind such works as The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, died on Tuesday night. He was 91.

Although slowed in recent years by a stroke that left him confined to a wheelchair, Bradbury remained active, turning out new novels, plays, screenplays and a volume of poetry, most recently writing the short story Take Me Home in the June 4 edition of the New Yorker.

Deborah Treisman, the editor who handled that piece, said over email that Bradbury started “with the idea that anything is possible, and pushing it further — to imagine what some of those possibilities might be — he helped to open up and stimulate the imaginations of millions of readers.”

But his writings — which ranged from sci-fi and horror to mystery and humour — also influenced a wave of Canadian authors, including Margaret Atwood.

“I read Ray Bradbury as a teenager and those stories really sank in, especially The Martian and the other stories in The Martian Chronicles, and Fahrenheit 451,” she wrote in the epilogue to an excerpt from her short story HeadLife, which was inspired by Bradbury and will be published in an upcoming anthology, Shadow Show. “Some writers jump straight to what we might call ‘deep metaphor,’ writing at a mythic level, and that is what these stories do.”

When contacted for comment, Atwood’s office added she was deeply saddened by the news and was looking forward to visiting Bradbury before her appearance at Comic-Con in San Diego next month.

Bradbury also scripted John Huston’s 1956 film version of Moby Dick and wrote for The Twilight Zone and other television programs, including The Ray Bradbury Theater, for which he adapted dozens of his works.

“What Bradbury had that most other science-fiction writers didn’t have at that time, was a love for beautiful langauge, evocative description, and haunting phrases that would stick with the reader,” says Robert J. Sawyer, the award-winning science-fiction writer of books such as Trigger and Flashforward.

Credited with bringing science-fiction ideas to the mainstream public, he also became the rare science-fiction writer treated seriously by the literary world. In 2007, he received a special Pulitzer Prize citation “for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.”

“There were four major 20th-century science fiction writers: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Of those four, the first three were all published principally in science-fiction magazines. They were preaching to the converted,” says Sawyer, who’s based in Toronto.

“Bradbury was the one guy who was published in places like the Saturday Evening Post. He was the guy who brought science fiction to the masses. If he hadn’t existed, science fiction would have been a well-kept secret in literature instead of a widely consumed phenomenon.”

Bradbury, in other words, “elevated science fiction out of the pulp realm,” says Dave Duncan, a 79-year-old fantasy writer based in Victoria. “He was not just someone who could imagine things, he could also write, and his style was superb. Bradbury was poetry.”

Bradbury broke through in 1950 with The Martian Chronicles, a series of intertwined stories that satirized capitalism, racism and superpower tensions as it portrayed Earth colonizers destroying an idyllic Martian civilization. The book was a Cold War morality tale in which imagined lives on other planets serve as commentary on human behaviour on Earth. The Martian Chronicles has been published in more than 30 languages, was made into a TV miniseries, inspired a computer game, and prophesized the banning of books, especially works of fantasy, a theme Bradbury would take on fully in the 1953 release, Fahrenheit 451 (451 degrees Fahrenheit, Bradbury had been told, was the temperature at which texts went up in flames).

“Reading Fahrenheit when I was a teen was monumental in terms of my understanding of what science fiction could be,” says Hayden Trenholm, a sci-fi author and playwright in Ottawa. “It was the first of the really powerful political sci-fi books and it set the stage for the entire evolution of the genre since then. He was the first real voice that transformed sci fi from what it was in the ’40s and ’50s — which looked mostly at scientifc ideas, like robots and space flights — into something that also looked at politcal issues. He made it much more socially relevant.”

Fahrenheit 451, a futuristic classic often taught alongside George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, anticipated iPods, interactive television, electronic surveillance and live, sensational media events, including televised police pursuits. It was Bradbury’s only true science-fiction work, according to Watts, who says all his other works should have been classified as fantasy.

Although involved in many futuristic projects, including the New York World’s Fair of 1964 and the Spaceship Earth display at Walt Disney World in Florida, Bradbury was deeply attached to the past. He refused to drive a car or fly. “I’m not afraid of machines,” he told Writer’s Digest in 1976. “I don’t think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don’t take the toys out of their hands, we’re fools.”

“If he hadn’t existed, science fiction would have been a well-kept secret in literature instead of a widely consumed phenomenon”

Despite his strong opinions, Bradbury, first and foremost, was an intent listener, says Ed Greenwood, a science fiction author based in Toronto who met the man on several occasions.

“He was a delight and had a great sense of humour. Some scientists are dry, or, to put it bluntly, boring, but others are a joy because they are also good listeners and are generous. That was Ray. Not only did he earn his place in American letters, transcending being just a sci fi writer, he was also just an incredibly nice guy.”

Born Ray Douglas Bradbury on Aug. 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Ill., the author once described himself as “that special freak, the man with the child inside who remembers all.” He claimed to have total recall of his life, dating even to his final weeks in his mother’s womb.

“When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents’ boarding house, in Waukegan, Illinois,” begins Take Me Home, Bradbury’s recent New Yorker story.

“I went a trifle mad that autumn. It’s the only way to describe the intensity with which I devoured the stories.”

It’s fitting, then, that he would have such a similar impact on so many others.

Bradbury is survived by his four daughters. Marguerite Bradbury, his wife of 56 years, died in 2003.